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Art Texts Pics is an online magazine published both in Italian and in English. Established in 2010, Art Texts Pics contains interviews, conversations, essays, exhibition previews and event agendas. The magazine covers both well known, institutional realities – such as museum exhibitions, established galleries and foundations – and alternative, young spaces.

I met up with Camille Henrot on a rainy Parisian afternoon to discuss her most recent travelling exhibition project “The Pale Fox”, commissioned produced and shown by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Bétonsalon, Paris; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, and now finally at KÖNIG GALERIE where the exhibition has just opened. We organised a lunch date at the Chameleon. It may or may not be a significant detail but I will find out mid conversation the importance of the reptile’s significance.

Camille speaks Italian, I compliment her on speaking it so well and I encourage her to pursue the language for the rest of the interview. She agrees to do so and tells me that it’s the first time she has done an interview in Italian. Between the different dinner courses (she chose the kidneys “…like Léopold Bloom in Ulysses…”) we talked about various things since it has been a while since we had seen each other and she also told me a very funny Breton story that her grandmother had told her. Apparently her grandmother liked doing just that, telling stories. I find this information very interesting in understanding the refined narrative dynamics of her work.

The coffee arrives and we begin the interview…

Davide Bertocchi: You’ve been living in New York for some time. What kind of changes have you experienced and how have these changes influenced your work?

Camille Henrot: I didn’t just become a New Yorker overnight. I went to New York for six months and then I went back to Paris for a bit. I’ve gone backwards and forwards several times. For me New York is very abstract. When you’re in New York you don’t feel like you’re in the United States because this city doesn’t belong to any nationality. As described by Yona Friedman, New York is a world of its own. For me New York represents one extreme of being everywhere to the other of being nowhere. Of course it has influenced my work. For example the project that I did involving Ikebana was carried out in New York because when I moved there I didn’t have any of my belongings with me, I had left everything in Paris. It is only when I started to work on “Grosse Fatigue” that I decided to move to New York for good. This involved transferring all the things from my apartment and from my study. I like to accumulate things and I think my exhibition “The Pale Fox “reflects this.

Instead of moving in with 50 boxes I had somehow accumulated 350! I am very attached to objects. I have a mountain of things as well as things that I make myself, so moving for me was a real challenge. This particular attachment that I have makes me focus on the condition of objects such as the difficulty of moving from one place to another. It also makes me think about this virtual world that we live in where things are nonexistent, where the material is disappearing. I started to think a lot about these two ideas and how we could relate one to the other: in particular the fetishism of objects and the sentimental attachment to objects that once belonged to me. I think that the Smithsonian and museums have the same emotional connection to historical objects which could also be described as a sentimental attachment. Yet at the same time we are trying to figure out what it means to live in a digital society where we associate ourselves more to images rather than objects.

DB: When I invited you to take part in my exhibition Zodiaco, I specified that I was choosing artists according to their star signs; you told me that the current method that I was applying to determine my choices was similar to the method you had used for your exhibition “The Pale Fox” at Chisenhale in London: as you said “the distribution of objects in space following a grid of equivalences between principles, the cardinal points, the age of man and the four elements”. Could you tell me more about the systems you used and how you applied them to the exhibition?

CH: Yes, in fact I was very much inspired by the book “Le renard pâle” written by two ethnologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen in 1965. What struck me the most from this text was the recognition of man’s ability to create a system where everything can re-enter, by creating an artificial form of common knowledge that remains aesthetic yet pleasant. Pleasant meaning that it can be shared. After looking at the amount of space available in Chisenhale, which happens to remind me of the golden rectangle, I realised that it would have been interesting to create an exhibition using my own personal Feng Shui. Every wall in the exhibition corresponds to a different principle. The first wall is the principle of Leibniz otherwise known as the “principle of being”, with reference to the shape of a spiral and to the idea of birth. On this wall I’ve placed the photo of my niece and the sculpture with the ostrich’s egg. Then there is another wall dedicated to the “principle of continuity” which represents how things develop and grow. An example of this is the principle of self-inclusion, following the idea that the fish comes from an egg which comes from a fish and so on. Things are self-inclusive and everything corresponds to childhood.

Another wall is called “the principle of sufficient reason” which corresponds to the time of maturity where we discover our limits linked to different factors such as money, water, the earth, illness, death and problems. In other words it makes reference to the limitations that form our reality. All in all, the walls have the role of providing an equivalent orientation of north, south, east and west.

DB: …and in the exhibition is there a specific connection between the actual cardinal points and these principles right here. For example, this one goes north, this one goes south, that one goes west…?

CH: At the beginning there was, but now I have to change it a little bit because the cardinal directions of every exhibition that I do seem to change slightly, therefore I must adapt my work. Finally, after “maturity” there is a wall that corresponds to the old age linked to “the principle of the identity of indiscernible”. As if this wasn’t enough, each wall makes a reference respectively to an element: water, air, earth and fire. This is how I thought about the exhibition, building these groups. I also bought four hundred objects on eBay, and with the other things that I already had in the studio, I started to think about how to organize them following this system.

DB: In fact my following question goes on to this topic. The idea of looking for objects on eBay intrigues me. How do you choose the objects? Are your choices determined by something or is it down to chance? Or is there room for chance inside this mental structure?

CH: The problem is that I’m very obsessive and every time that I start something I find it very hard to control myself, this happens when I’m on eBay. The concept of having limits and restrictions is a big problem for me. In fact, setting up the exhibition for the first time was a lot of fun because I found it very easy to set up everything apart from this wall that represents maturity and limits, or otherwise known as the wall of “the principle of sufficient reason”. I had a very precise idea of how to organise all the other principles but I really struggled with this particular wall. I don’t like just thinking about one limit. When I’m on eBay there comes a time when I buy lots of things but then I go and do something else because otherwise I can’t stop myself. Therefore for this exhibition I made a list of keywords and I asked my assistant to suggest some objects based on those words and I chose from this selection. This seemed to be the most rational way to go about it otherwise I would have spent night and day on eBay.

DB: This means that it’s not a random search but is instead influenced by certain keywords…

CH: Exactly, it’s a linguistic research, it’s essential that the object relates to a certain thing. For example an object that I find funny is “The Bible Crosswords”, the connection between Christianity and the idea of a game is important. A crossword is something that people do when they have nothing else to do. Therefore it could be said that it reflects religion in this part of the world, which is more of a hobby for ladies over fifty who go to church or do crossword puzzles. I like this idea of a game being linked to the Bible because it also has something to do with the idea of dogma and being trapped in a closed sphere of ideas. Not surprisingly, crosswords can have many constraints and provide a limited space for responses. For this reason I have never really liked crosswords because there is never the possibility for more than one answer as only one answer can be written. I’m not able to play a game where there is only one specific outcome; it reminds me of religious dogmatism. Nevertheless, I like this object as it inspires me with all those thoughts.